A watercolour portrait of Sirdar Risaldar-Major Mani Singh (d. 1892), half length, turned to the left. He has a long grey beard, a yellow and blue turban, grey jacket with braids and red epaulettes. Signed by the sitter in Urdu along the bottom, and signed and inscribed by the artist at lower right: Delhi Camp / G.S.

Sirdar Risaldar-Major Mani Singh was born in Gujranwala in the Punjab. He was the first and most famous Indian officer who served in Hodson's Horse, an irregular cavalry regiment of the British indian army formed during the Indian Rebellion of 1857-8. 

During the First Sikh War of 1845-6, Mani Singh was a cavalry officer in the Sikh army fighting the British. In 1852 he enlisted as a mounted policeman in Neville Chamberlain's Punjab Police. In 1857 he was asked to raise recruits to form Hodson's Horse. He served with the British throughout the Siege of Delhi, a key event of the Indian Rebellion in which Indian troops rose up against British colonnial rule. During the Battle of Nawabganj he was badly wounded having shown great bravery in action. He was awarded many decorations, including the Order of Merit 1st class, and the Order of British India 1st class. He retired from military serivce in 1877, and was subsequently made manager of the Darbar Sahib (Golden Temple) at Amritsar. 

Count von Seckendorff was a German diplomat and courtier and a keen amateur artist who exhibited as an honorary member of the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours between 1887 and 1893. He served as Court Chamberlain to Victoria, Crown Princess of Prussia, who was Queen Victoria and Prince Albert's eldest child. Seckendorff was given a leave of absence by the Crown Princess in the autumn of 1875 to go on a sketching tour to India, where he made this watercolour.

This is a portrait from the Indian sketches album comprising watercolours and drawings by Egron Lundgren, Nicholas Chevalier, Count von Seckendorff and Robert Gosset Woodthorpe. Most of Lundgren's works within the album are set against a backdrop of the Indian Rebellion of 1857, and were presented to Queen Victoria. Chevalier's watercolours represent high-ranking Sikh and Ceylonese [Sri Lankan] people who would have sat to the artist during his visits to India and Ceylon while journeying with Prince Alfred, the Duke of Edinburgh, on the homeward voyage aboard HMS Galatea in 1870.